Iran is allowing a small but growing number of commercial ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, according to ship tracking data.
Eight vessels, not including ships flying the Iranian flag, were detected in the critical waterway via the vessels’ automatic identification systems on Monday, maritime intelligence company Windward said on Tuesday. The number of transits was “nearly double” the numbers seen in recent days, according to Windward.
Michelle Wiese Bockmann, an analyst at Windward, said that a growing number of ships have been rerouting via Iran’s territorial waters, suggesting that Tehran is allowing “permission-based transits to friendly countries”.
“Western-affiliated vessels won’t voluntarily come into Iranian waters, but likely Chinese, Indian and others will,” Bockmann said in a post on X.
MarineTraffic, another ship tracking service, recorded nine transits on Monday and Sunday, compared with five over the previous two days.Traffic through the strait, which normally carries about one-fifth of global oil supplies, has plunged more than 95 percent since the start of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.
Daily transits by non-Iranian ships, mostly Chinese, Indian and Pakistani-flagged vessels, have dropped into the single digits amid Iranian threats against shipping in the region.
The effective halt of traffic through the waterway has sent oil prices surging above $100 per barrel, an increase of more than 40 percent compared with before the start of the war.Tehran has sent mixed messages about the status of the strait, which is bordered by Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi said on Monday that the strait was “open, but closed to our enemies”, after a spokesperson for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) earlier this month warned that any ship attempting passage would be set ablaze.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that Washington did not need other countries’ help to unblock shipping traffic, even as he chided NATO partners for rebuffing his proposals for the deployment of an international coalition of warships to secure the waterway.
“Despite the fact that we helped them so much – we have thousands of soldiers in different countries all over the world – they don’t want to help us, which is amazing,” Trump said during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Michael Martin at the Oval Office.
The US military said late on Tuesday that it had dropped bunker buster bombs on “hardened” Iranian missile sites located near the strait.
“The Iranian anti-ship cruise missiles in these sites posed a risk to international shipping in the strait,” US Central Command said in a post on X.
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